Where — Against decadence

(back to Study groups)

Can we resist decadence?

Here, in implementing study groups on A Place to Study, advances in knowledge may incidentally occur, but they are not our object, which concerns self-understanding and the formation of judgment. In interacting with a text or another person, we seek primarily neither to acquire knowledge nor to critique error, but to enter reciprocally in dialogue with our interlocutors.

We all get good at seeing through peer-talk in the midst of powerful hierarchies. At the start of a class or a meeting, "Let's all just say what we think!" cues a silently sarcastic, "Yeah, right." Neither the boss nor the teacher can think for you, and all-too-often not even for himself. That's the way it is for us all — we can only think for ourselves and it is not easy to do. We interact with others to help each other think for ourselves.

On A Place to Study let us try to recognize a major problem in thinking for ourselves: the problem of phatic communication, communication that serves only to signal a social relation without intellectual substance or meaning. In everyday exchange, when (A) says, "Hi. How are you?" and (B) replies, "Fine, thanks," — neither wants to know the health, physical or mental, of the other, and the answer "fine" parries the query without answering it. The simplicity and triviality of this example unfortunately lulls us all into a state of communicative complacency.

Almost all communication taking place around us has the same function of establishing a social connection almost entirely free of meaning or substance. News coverage serves less to inform about the substance and significance of events than to indicate through those events how people line up on the political spectrum and what feelings they might comfortably display about them within their favored reference groups. Advertising tells up less about products and services and much more about how they will situate their possessors in economic, social, and consumption classes. How much does our meritocracy, from grade school through the Ph.D., reflect substantive intellectual and cultural capacity, and how much knowing what phatic signs to flash and showing off what one cares about?

We can perhaps take the proportion of phatic communication at an historical juncture as indicating the degree of decadence within it. A thoroughly decadent society, promoting great unanimity of purpose and extreme emotional backing for the phatic sense of what must be done, will nevertheless display a tragicomic inability to accomplish anything, lacking a clear sense of actuality. Witness not only the great wall of Trumpistan, but centuries-old movements for civil rights, for equality in economic, social, and political life, and for action on that polymorphous crisis of population, resource depletion, pollution, and global climate change. We all too easily fall into saying without a thought what's expected among those we know and like. A genuine place to study will emerge as persons, one by one, realize that new social movements will not overcome the decadent power to turn actualities into a din of phatic cliques! We must do it as persons, one by one, through our ability to nurture our powers of judgment by forming ourselves through self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons. We need help in doing so, not by others instructing us in how to do it, but by their spurring us to draw insight and understanding out of our lifeworlds. We should try to make our study groups a means in that effort.